Form
Committees of Working and Poor People to Expropriate the Bourgeoisie
and Drive Out U.N. Mercenaries! No Confidence in Préval –
Workers to Power!Attempted Election Theft in HaitiLavalas supporters set
up flaming barricades in streets of Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince to
protest election-rigging by rightist ex-coup plotters and U.N. (Photo: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters)

FEBRUARY 14 – A week
after Haiti’s
presidential
elections, no victor has been proclaimed and the Haitian masses are
rising up
in angry protest. Exit poll surveys conducted by international
observers
indicated that René Préval had won with 54 to 55 percent
of the vote. Préval is
a liberal who was endorsed by the bulk of the Fanmi Lavalas party of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the populist ex-priest who was removed by the
U.S. two
years ago and forced into exile. However, after two days of vote
counting, the
electoral commission (dominated by right-wing forces) suddenly fell
silent, while
circulating figures that had the frontrunner slipping under 50 percent.
If no
candidate receives an absolute majority, a runoff election would be
required.
Although Préval’s campaign was financed by leading
industrialists, and he
received more than four times as many votes as his nearest rival, the
hostility
of Haiti’s rich toward Préval and Aristide, and the
bourgeoisie’s
visceral hatred of the impoverished plebeian masses who follow Lavalas,
is such
that it is likely that the other 32 candidates would overcome their
squabbles
and use their control of the electoral machinery to block Préval.

So
on Saturday and Sunday, February 11 and 12, hundreds of thousands of
people
poured out of the slums to march on the presidential palace demanding,
“Give us
results!” and “Préval forever!” In the vast shantytown of
Cité Soleil,
community activists called on the 300,000 inhabitants to mobilize,
which they
did. By Monday, barricades of burning tires and the hulks of wrecked
cars had
gone up in cities and on main roads around the country. More than 100
roadblocks were reported on the highway from Cap-Haïtien in the
north to
Port-au-Prince. A crowd of several thousand Lavalas supporters crashed
through
the gates of the luxurious Hotel Montana in the bourgeois suburb of
Pétionville, where the election council was headquartered,
demanding to see
vote tallies. At roadblocks that virtually paralyzed the capital,
Préval
backers shouted, “We will burn the entire city unless they give us the
results.” United Nations occupation troops opened fire on a crowd,
killing at
least one demonstrator. Summoned by the U.N. to tell the masses to go
home,
Préval instead declared that there had been “massive fraud” and
called on
Haitians to “continue demonstrating,” while saying barricades should be
taken
down.

There
is no doubt whatsoever that the vote counting has been rigged. The
Haitian
masses immediately sensed this, and there is plenty of evidence to back
them
up. While the electoral commission stalled in releasing figures,
dissident
commissioners said that Préval had received 52 percent of the
vote and there
had been deliberate “manipulation” of vote totals. Two percent of the
2.2
million votes cast never even arrived at the tabulation centers.
Another 7.5
percent of the votes were invalidated as improperly marked – pretty
difficult
since all voters had to do was put an “x” over a candidate’s picture.
Tally
sheets from 254 of the 9,000 polling stations were destroyed when
right-wing
parties attacked provincial polling centers. Votes from over 500
centers have
not been tabulated, supposedly for lack of certain codes; 25,000 of
these
uncounted votes were from the slum districts of the capital where
support for
Préval was running over 90 percent. Now Haitian TV is showing
boxes with thousands
of ballots marked for Préval, many partially burned, in a
garbage dump. Up to
15 percent of the ballots are missing or have been thrown out, and
128,000
blank ballots, an unusually high 4.5 percent of the total, were added
to the
total, making it much harder to obtain an absolute majority.

Spokesmen
for Washington have made it clear that they can “work with”
Préval. Indeed,
U.S. and U.N. officials asked him to run in order to entice Lavalas
supporters
into the “political process.” But the result may not be to their
liking, with a
veritable landslide (lavalas in Creole) for the stand-in for the
president they hustled out of the palace in 2004. Dumarsais Simeus, a
Haitian-American business tycoon who was prevented from running for
president
because of his dual citizenship, is planning to work with
Préval. Yet the
country’s business elite is suggesting that they will stop at nothing
to keep
out Préval. They didn’t mount a coup and invasion to overthrow
Aristide only to
see his former protégé come back. Sweatshop boss and
presidential also-ran
Charles Henri Baker declared, “I cannot let this guy get into power....
He is
the worst thing that could happen to Haiti if he gets into power” (Miami
Herald, 13 February). Meanwhile on the barricades, slum dwellers on
the
barricades are vowing, “we’ll bring the guns out,” if Préval is
blocked from
taking office.

As
a showdown looms, the U.S. imperialists are scrambling to find a way
out of the
impasse. With open confrontation in the streets over the attempt by
right-wing
reactionaries to steal the election, revolutionary Marxists stand on
the side
of the vast mass of poor black Haitians against the U.N. occupation
forces and
Haitian police on the other side of the barricades, while giving no
political
support to Préval and Aristide. We warn against illusions in
these bourgeois
liberal populists, who have been put in office by the U.S. Marines in
the past
and can be removed by Washington if they cause problems. What is needed
is a class
mobilization in the factories on both sides of the Haiti/Dominican
border, to
lead the urban and rural poor against their exploiters and oppressors.
Trotskyists would have opposed voting for “Préval prezidan,” or
for any of the
capitalist candidates, while calling today for the formation of
committees of
working and poor people to expropriate the bourgeoisie and drive out
the U.N.
mercenary occupation forces. No Confidence in Préval – Build a
Haitian and
Dominican Trotskyist group – Workers to Power! n

Imperialist
Occupation: Massacres and Sham Elections

United Nations
“peacekeepers” keep voters from slums of Haiti's capital out of voting
station, February 7.
U.N. troops fired shots to “calm” the crowd. Drive the U.N. out
of Haiti! (Photo: Tyler
Hicks/New York Times)

FEBRUARY 10 – On
February 7,
Haitians went massively to the polls in an election that the United
Nations occupation
forces hoped would bring stability to the turbulent country. People
rose well
before dawn, put on their best clothes, and at many voting stations in
the
capital more than half the voters were lined up by 6 a.m. The
authorities had
refused to set up ballot boxes in the huge slum neighborhood of
Cité Soleil,
with more than 60,000 registered voters, yet people poured out of the
shantytown and walked for kilometers to cast their vote. The leading
candidate
in the presidential race, far ahead in early returns, is René
Préval, formerly
the protégé of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
the populist ex-priest
who was seized by U.S. invaders two years ago and hustled into African
exile.
Préval, who was earlier president between 1996 and 2001, was
endorsed by the
majority of Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party and was the clear favorite
of the
poor. But despite all the hoopla about “democracy” and illusions in
Préval, the
president will only be a front-man for colonial occupation, beholden to
the
U.S. and the rapacious Haitian bourgeoisie, and will not raise the
Haitian
masses out of desperate poverty.

In the run-up to the
election there was widespread fear
that the vote would be disrupted by violence. Haitians recall the 1987
election
day massacre when dozens were gunned down by police. Placing polling
stations
far from Cité Soleil, a bastion of support for Aristide, raised
suspicions of
an attempt to curtail votes for Préval, and possibly to lure
Lavalas militants
into a trap where they could be arrested. The failure of those
particular
stations to open for almost four hours led to noisy turmoil and a
protest march
on the presidential palace. But the turnout was so huge that repression
or
openly preventing people from voting risked setting off a social
explosion that
would have consumed the capital of Port-au-Prince. Moreover, even in
affluent
suburbs such as Pétionville, some polling stations registered 70
percent for
Préval, to the consternation of more right-wing candidates. When
the frontrunner’s
lead fell from 61 percent to just over 50 percent a day later, raising
the
possibility of a runoff vote if he fails to get an absolute majority,
there was
widespread grumbling about possible fraud by the election commission.

Préval ran on
the Lespwa (Hope) ticket, yet the Haitian
masses’ hopes in him will be in vain. In fact, as the New York Times (10 February) revealed, “Mr. Préval was
sought out by the United States and governments leading the United
Nations
Stabilization Mission struggling to restore order.” Far from calling
for the
removal of the U.N. occupation forces, he has called for them to stay
for two
years or more, and to increase the number of police. The virtual
president-elect has adopted mildly populist language, saying
“Reconciliation
isn't the real problem for Haiti. The real problem is poverty.” At the
same
time, he bragged that he was “the only candidate who promises
nothing,”
and said that at best it would take a decade to raise living standards
to the
level they were in 1980. His U.S. patrons have made it clear that they
expect
“reconciliation” with the bourgeois elite, and according to the same Times
report, Préval “said that much of his campaign had been financed
by the elite,
and that he would appoint a prime minister from the political party
that wins
control of the parliament, which is highly unlikely to be his own.”

No
elections are going to provide “stability” for Haiti or resolve any
fundamental
issue, any more than did the election of Aristide in 1990, which
quickly led to
a military coup, or his reelection in 2000, which was boycotted by the
right-wing opposition, ultimately leading to the 2004 coup/invasion.
The
political turmoil is a reflection of the explosive social conditions in
a
country with a tiny minority of “gros mangeurs” (big eaters) and
a huge
majority of “ventres creux” (empty bellies). The violence and
gangs in
Cité Soleil are the direct result of poverty, of a population
condemned to live
in squalor strewn with garbage and sinking in mud, where more than
three-quarters of the adults have no job. The statistics for the nation
as a
whole are no better: a majority that survives on less than $1 a day,
life
expectancy of 53 years, a quarter of all children suffering from
chronic
malnutrition, 80 percent lacking schooling. Foreign aid won’t change
that, nor
will adding a few more jobs at starvation wages in “free trade zones.”
It will
take nothing less than a thorough-going social revolution to overcome
these inhuman
conditions.

Bourgeois
“democracy” will solve nothing in Haiti, and is impossible in a country
with
such a vast social chasm, where the weak local ruling class has for the
last
century depended on its U.S. godfathers for survival. Those leftists
who talk
of “two-stage” revolution are peddling deadly lies: the “democratic”
first
stage is invariably a fraud, and the second stage is usually a massacre
of the
toilers. A permanent revolution is required to secure real
democratic
rights and the rule of the oppressed majority, in which the working
class, led
by a revolutionary-internationalist workers party and backed by the
peasantry
and urban poor, takes power and proceeds to expropriate the Haitian
bourgeoisie
and break the stranglehold of imperialism. Such a revolution cannot
take hold
and secure lasting victory unless it is immediately extended, in the
first instance
to the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of
Hispaniola,
and throughout the Antilles, and ultimately to the imperialist center.
Haiti on
its own cannot “pull itself up by its bootstraps,” but as part of world
socialist
revolution this impoverished Caribbean island can flourish as never
before.

Imperialist
Occupiers Stage “Demonstration
Election”

For the
last 23
months, Haiti has once again been under
imperialist occupation, for the third time in nine decades.1This time colonial rule of
the Caribbean black
republic has been
sanctioned by
that imperialist “den of thieves,” the United Nations. The U.S.
expeditionary
force that kidnapped Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide on 29
February
2004 and occupied the capital of Port-au-Prince was immediately joined
by
French and Canadian troops. It was an ostentatious show of imperialist
“solidarity” with Washington despite differences over the 2003 invasion
(but
not the subsequent occupation) of Iraq. Yet the Pentagon needed its
troops in
the Near East, where it faces a tenacious Iraqi insurgency, and the
French and
Canadians were needed to patrol Afghanistan. So they brought in “United
Nations” troops in blue helmets under the command of a Brazilian
general. The
9,300 U.N. “peacekeepers” are a murderous imperialist occupation force,
using
troops and cops from semi-colonial countries as mercenaries, which
should be
run out of Haiti.

The
U.S./“U.N.” occupation of Haiti has been a horror show from the
beginning,
leading to the utter devastation of what was already the poorest
country in the
hemisphere. Under puppet president Gérard Latortue, the past two
years have
been filled with one massacre after another, carried out by right-wing
paramilitaries (called “freedom fighters” by Latortue), the Haitian
police and
U.N. forces alike. This slaughter was punctuated by natural disasters
such as
Hurricane Jeanne (September 2004) that left thousands dead in the flood
waters,
while the occupying forces stood by and did nothing. The economy is a
wreck,
thousands of factory jobs have disappeared, schools, hospitals and
other state
services are barely functioning, with many institutions shut down
completely.
Kidnappings for ransom are rampant, often by slum gangs but in many
cases by elements
of the police, businessmen and politicians. Now right-wing businessmen
are
demanding of the U.N. mission (known as MINUSTAH), “When are you going
to
finish Cité Soleil? When are you going to destroy Cité
Soleil?” (Miami
Herald, 4 February).

Amid
this chaos, misery and terror, the colonial occupiers staged a
counterfeit
election, after being postponed several times. For Haitian poor and
working
people, all of the candidates represent the interests of the
insatiable Haitian
bourgeoisie. Open Lavalas candidates were banned and prominent
pro-Aristide
spokesmen (including Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and Father Gerard
Jean-Juste)
imprisoned. Préval, the
presumptive president-elect not only accepts and relies on the U.N.
occupation,
when he was president previously as Aristide’s hand-picked successor he
implemented
the anti-worker policies of the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund. So
did Aristide after he was restored to office by U.S. troops in 1994,
and again
after his reelection in 2000. Loyally serving their imperialist
masters, the
former “priest of the slums” and his “twin brother” Préval
ordered widespread
privatizations, leading to layoffs of thousands of workers at
state-owned
companies, the gutting of vital social services and the ruin of Haitian
farmers. In this election Lavalas split, with its right wing supporting
Marc Bazin, a former official of the
World Bank trounced by Aristide in the 2000 election. What all this
shows is
that despite the illusions of many leftists, Lavalas has been a
bourgeois party
from the outset.

The rest of the
presidential line-up was a rogue’s
gallery of Haiti’s brutal exploiters and mass murderers. Among them was
Leslie
Manigat, a conservative former supporter of the dictator
François “Papa
Doc” Duvalier, who was briefly president as a front for the military in
1988 until
they dumped him. The favorite of the business elite was Charles
Henri Baker,
a U.S. resident and sweatshop owner. Another notable candidate was Guy
Philippe, a former police chief of Delmas (where his cops summarily
executed
slum dwellers) reputedly tied to drug traffickers and the CIA, who
campaigned
with Louis Jodel Chamblain, a death squad chief responsible for the
1994
Raboteau massacre. Evans Paul, Aristide’s one-time campaign
manager,
became leader of the U.S.-funded Democratic Convergence and greeted
Philippe
when the military “rebel” leader arrived in the capital in March 2004. Franck
Romain, another presidential hopeful, was a top army officer and
leader of
the dreaded Tontons Macoutes killers under Duvalier; as mayor of the
capital,
he carried out the 1988 massacre at St.-Jean-Bosco church where
Aristide was
preaching. Himler Rebu is a former army chief in the junta
that ousted
Aristide in 1991, whose troops and paramilitary “attachés” were
responsible for
thousands of killings.

The League for the
Fourth International warns that every
one of the candidates in this sham election is an enemy of the workers
and the
vast impoverished masses of Haiti’s population, and that any “elected”
president will only be a figurehead for the continued imperialist
occupation.
Organizing “demonstration elections” to mask colonial rule is a
standard ploy
of U.S. imperialism, from the Dominican Republic and Vietnam in the
1960s to
Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti today. Revolutionary Marxists in Haiti
would have
urged Haitian working people and opponents of imperialism not to vote
for any of
the capitalist candidates, and instead to organize mass worker-peasant
resistance to defend areas under attack by the U.N. military/police
forces and
the Haitian puppet police and to kick the imperialist occupation forces
out of
Haiti.

U.N.
Occupation: Massacres and Misery

As soon as the U.S.
Marines landed on 29 February 2004,
supposedly on a mission to “restore order” and a “sense of stability,”
the
revenge slaughter began in earnest. During the three weeks leading up
to the
U.S. invasion, a band of 200 right-wing former members of the disbanded
Haitian
Army had crossed the border from the Dominican Republic, seized several
northern towns and headed south. During their march on the capital, the
“rebel”
army left a trail of blood, slaughtering hundreds of supporters of
Aristide’s
Fanmi Lavalas movement. After they arrived, the killing escalated.
According to
a National Lawyers Guild fact-finding mission, the director of the
state morgue
admitted that 800 bodies were dumped and buried in a mass grave on
March 7, and
another 200 bodies were dumped on March 28. Members of a second
delegation
organized by the Quixote Center reported that after a 10,000-strong
March 5
demonstration against the occupation, the Marines went into the
neighborhood of
Bel Air firing, killing dozens (death toll estimates range from 60 to
78).

In
the first days after the U.S. invasion, paramilitaries drove around the
capital
in pickup trucks kidnapping people considered to be enemies. Hit lists
of
Lavalas activists were read over the radio daily. Hundreds were thrown
into
jail, where they remain to this day. As the U.S. and later U.N.
occupation
forces established themselves, random terror was replaced by periodic
raids on
the poor neighborhoods. Although some MINUSTAH officers speak French,
including
CIVPOL (civilian police) commanders from Quebec, none speak Creole.
Thus they
cannot communicate either with local residents or with the Haitian
police they
are supposed to work with (and the troops and cops from 43 countries
can barely
communicate among themselves). In neighborhood operations, members of
the U.N.
forces say, their operational guidelines are “shoot before you get
shot.” A
MINUSTAH official admitted, “Too often the military patrol in their
armored
vehicles, helmets on, fingers on the trigger, which reinforces the
perception
of an occupation army” (Le Monde, 8 February).

When Lavalas
supporters from Cité Soleil tried to join a
protest demonstration on 30 September 2004, they were met with
a
fusillade from local gangs bought off by the bourgeois right wing. The
demonstration of 10,000 itself came under fire by the Haitian police,
while
MINUSTAH troops stood by observing. In the following days, there were
repeated
incursions into the Bel Air and Fort National districts by police and
U.N.
forces. Tens of residents were killed and dozens arrested. When a
couple of
cops turned up beheaded, the bourgeoisie claimed that a mythical
“Operation
Baghdad” had been launched by pro-Aristide gangs “linked to drug
trafficking.”
This outcry was intended to cover the very real operation underway
against
Lavalas strongholds.

Meanwhile, the army
has begun reorganizing as guard dogs
for the bourgeoisie. Hundreds of heavily armed men in camouflage
uniforms with
FADH (Armed Forces of Haiti) insignias are quartered in
Pétionville, where they
are “advised” by English-speaking, U.S.-trained soldiers in civilian
clothes.
From there they periodically launch forays against slum areas. “FADH”
bases are
also reported in Cap Haitien, Ouanaminthe, Fort Liberté,
Jérémie, Petit Goâve
and Jacmel.

A
human rights mission sponsored by the University of Miami School of Law
visited
Haiti in November 2004. There the observed the regrouping of
the FADH, a
force known for coups and massacres, and its incursion into the slum of
La
Saline, as well as raids by the Haitian National Police, often masked,
in poor
neighborhoods:

“There
are dead bodies in the street almost daily, including innocent
bystanders,
women and children.... The violent repression by police and former
soldiers ...
with the UN forces visibly acting as support for, rather than a check
on the
official violence, has generated desperate fear in a community that is
quickly
losing its young men to violent death or arbitrary arrest.”

In
Bel Air, community activists showed them a list of 100 residents killed
in a
month and a half, listing names, dates and places where they were
killed. The
mission reported a massacre in broad daylight of 12 young men by
uniformed
police in the Fort National neighborhood; it published photographs of
the
police execution of five young men in Delmas. At the Port-au-Prince
General
Hospital, they observed doctors refusing to treat patients lying in
pools of
blood because they had no money. At the State Morgue, they showed
photos of dead
bodies strewn about being consumed by swarms of maggots, their skin and
even
faces eaten away in the space of a few days (“Haiti: Human Rights
Investigation:
November 11-21, 2004”). The scenes are like a horror movie, making the
torture
photos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq seem antiseptic in comparison.

Despite numerous
reports by human rights groups, the
slaughter has continued. On 28 February 2005, a mass protest
march was
held on the anniversary of the coup. Haitian police fired on unarmed
demonstrators as U.N. forces stood by, taking photos of demonstration
leaders.
On 27 April 2005, a demonstration of over 10,000 Lavalas
supporters was
again fired on by police. Several demonstrators were killed by shots in the back. Police planted a gun in
the hand
of one of the dead men, demanding that photographers take pictures. A
Haitian
police spokesmen called the nine dead “bandits,” while Canadian spokesman for the U.N.
CIVPOL denounced the march as an
“unauthorized, illegal demonstration.”

On 6 July 2005, some 350
“peacekeepers” launched a classic
“search and
destroy” assault on the slum district of Cité Soleil. The
MINUSTAH surrounded
the area with 18-20 armored personnel carriers before dawn, blocked off
the
entrances with shipping containers, and began combing through the
neighborhoods. Their main target was Fanmi Lavalas community leader
Emmanuel
“Drèd” Wilmé, whom they called a “gang leader” and
“outlaw.” With a barrage of
gunfire, including from a helicopter overhead, they managed to
assassinate
Wilmé and four other youth, while shooting into houses and
gunning down people
on the street, leaving another 19 civilian dead and two dozen wounded,
mostly
women and children. Brief accounts of this massacre dribbled out later
in the
bourgeois media, minimizing the number killed while emphasizing
pervasive
“street violence” and violent gangs in the slum districts.

U.N. officials said
they were “unaware” of civilians killed,
and called the dead “bandits.” However, a delegation from the San
Francisco
Labor Council was in Port-au-Prince at the time and visited the area
the next
day. They talked with residents, viewed videotapes of the slaughter and
concluded
there “there was indeed a massacre conducted by UN military forces in
Cité
Soleil on the morning of July 6th.” Brazilian general Augusto Heleno
Ribeiro
Pereira called the operation a success, since Wilmé was killed.
Two days after
the Cité Soleil massacre, an additional dozen people were killed
in the Bel Air
slum by Haitian police firing randomly into homes. As a result of the
outcry
over the July 6-8 bloodbath, the U.N. promised an investigation. Five
months
later a summary was leaked admitting that some civilians were killed
but claiming
they were “caught in the crossfire,” and that “UN troops fired only in
self-defence” (Independent [London], 10 January).

On 21 August 2005
came the most brazen massacre of
all. A soccer match had been sponsored by the U.S. in Gran
Ravin/Martissant, a
poor working-class district, to promote “peace.” During a break in the
game, in
front of 5,000 spectators, a group of police and paramilitaries in red
shirts
armed with hatchets and machetes marched onto the field, fired a few
shots,
ordered men to lie on the ground and then hacked them to death. A
videotape
captured the scene of horror. Up to 50 victims were reported, with at
least ten
confirmed dead, as U.N. forces stood guard. Killings by police and U.N.
forces
continued throughout the fall, reaching a crescendo at the end of
November,
when the Jordanian battalion of 750 soldiers that patrols Cité
Soleil day and
night opened fire in the Pele neighborhood and machine-gunned the
population,
leaving 15 dead. This provoked fighting that continued for three days.
In
mid-December, at least three students were shot by police during
demonstrations
against the visit of Dominican president Leonel Fernandes over the
persecution
of Haitian immigrants in the neighboring country.

The MINUSTAH/police
siege of slum districts reached a
fever pitch around Christmas, after a Canadian policeman and Jordanian
soldier
were killed. U.N. troops went into Cité Soleil and the
Drouillard district, and
on 25 December 2005 they reportedly attacked celebrations
(described as
“gang feasts”), machine-gunning homes and even churches. Meanwhile, the
wave of
kidnappings kept mounting. Rightist businessmen of the Chamber of
Commerce and
Industry used this to call on the U.N. to occupy Cité Soleil in
force. A private
sector shutdown was called for January 9 to push this demand. It had
the unmistakable
odor of the bosses’ “work stoppage” (lockout) in Venezuela in December
2002
aimed at toppling the Chávez government. U.N. envoy Valdes
promised to “intervene
in the coming days. I think there'll be collateral damage but we have
to impose
our force,” according to Reuters. It was in this context that the
Brazilian
MINUSTAH commander, Gen. Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar, was found
dead in
his hotel, reportedly a suicide. Reuters cited U.N. sources saying that
Bacellar “had opposed Valdes’ plan.” The U.N. and U.S. chiefs
apparently decided:
first the elections, then the crackdown.

For
Working-Peasant
Resistance Against Imperialist Occupation!

This
horrendous repression is carried out in the name of combating gangs,
gang
violence, drug-trafficking, gun-running, kidnapping and the like. Of
course,
the drug- and arms-trafficking kingpins are not living in impoverished
slums in
the sweltering, garbage-strewn flatlands near the sea but in luxurious
flower-bedecked
villas in Pétionville nestled in the hills above the capital.
The head of the national
police declared that “25 percent” of his force were involved in the
narcotics
trade, gun-running and kidnapping for ransom. Scions of the bourgeois
elite
have been implicated in acts of kidnapping, and some of the kidnap
victims have
been Lavalas supporters. On the other hand, there are certainly plenty
of
gangs, violence, drugs and guns in places like Cité Soleil and
Bel Air, as
there are in all shantytowns of desperately poor people surrounding the
major
cities in semi-colonial capitalist countries. Permanent unemployment
spawns
whole layers of what Marx called the “lumpenproletariat,” the
proletariat in
rags, from which criminal elements are easily recruited.

In
Cité Soleil there were such gangs, such as the one led by Thomas
Robinson
(“Labanyè”), based in the Boston neighborhood, which terrorized
the entire
district. But his gang was protected and financed by Group of 184
leader Andy
Apaid, the sweatshop owner, who bought their loyalty for $30,000, and
police
were ordered not to arrest him. On the other hand, there were numerous
“popular
organizations” affiliated with Aristide’s Lavalas. Pictures of their
leaders
were published by the police on “wanted” lists, with “Drèd”
Wilmé on the top of
the list. These were who the bourgeoisie referred to as “chimères”
(variously translated as ghosts or monsters).

There
are doubtless criminal gangs operating out of areas considered Aristide
strongholds, and some may overlap with Lavalas organizations. But what
the
bourgeoisie and U.N. call “gangs” are frequently Lavalas-affiliated
community
groups, which hardly “intimidate” the population. When Labanyè
was killed by
U.N. forces last May, there was a celebration in Cité Soleil, as
people were
overjoyed to be freed from his terror. When Wilmé was
assassinated by
the MINUSTAH in July, hundreds came out to march in the funeral
procession,
mourning the death of a popular leader. And on February 7, tens of
thousands of
residents of Cité Soleil voted, 92 percent for the
Lavalas-endorsed candidate.

The
desperate conditions of Haiti pose difficult situations for those who
fight for
the interests of the working class. Politically, genuine communists
give no
support either to Lavalas or to their bourgeois opponents. In the
period
leading up to the 2004 invasion/coup, it was necessary to oppose both
the
populist Aristide government and the Group of 184. In the
recent
elections, fighting for the class independence of the proletariat meant
opposing all the bourgeois parties and candidates.

Two
years ago, we pointed out: “Aristide’s chimères,
recruited from the
lumpenproletariat of the unemployed, would attack proletarian
revolutionaries
as quickly as they beat up students and ‘civil society’ marchers.” But
we
added, “faced with the threat of the return of the death squads and the
military/police
mass murderers, Haitian workers and peasants should seek to organize
their own
class organs of self-defense, which would make a temporary military
bloc with
the pro-Aristide ‘popular organizations’ to halt the forward march of
the
ultra-rightist reaction.” Today, revolutionary Marxists would seek to
organize
mass worker-peasant opposition to the U.N. occupation, that could draw
in slum
dwellers behind the working class.

Several labor
organizations in Haiti have, on the contrary,
lined up with the bourgeois erstwhile “opposition,” including the FOS
(Federation of Unionized Workers) and CATH (Autonomous Haitian Workers
Confederation). These outfits are basically empty shells left over from
the
1980s and ’90s and financed by the U.S. government through the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center in
order to
provide a “labor” component to their “unpopular front.” There is
nothing more
to be said about them: they are not workers organizations but cat’s
paws of
U.S. imperialism, and should be smashed.

A
labor grouping with leftist origins, Batay Ouvriye (B.O. – Workers
Struggle),
has had a different trajectory. During the decade of Lavalas rule under
Aristide and Préval, B.O. sought to organize agricultural
workers on plantations
in northern Haiti, as well as workers in free trade zone garment
plants. As a
result, they were the objects of repression by Lavalas mayors. As we
noted in
our article on “The Struggle for Workers Revolution in the Caribbean” (The
Internationalist No. 18, May-June 2004), at the end of 2003, as the
anti-Aristide mobilization was escalating, Batay Ouvriye declared that
“Lavalas
and the bourgeois opposition are two rotten legs of the same torn pair
of
pants.” However, while calling to “thwart the bourgeois orientation
within the
anti-Lavalas mobilization,” B.O. urged workers, poor peasants,
students, the
unemployed and “consistent progressives” to “build their autonomy” as
the “camp
of the people” representing the popular masses “within the general
movement of
struggle.” What this amounts to is that Batay Ouvriye tagged along
behind the
bourgeois opposition while claiming to be building “autonomy” within
the
“general movement of struggle” leading up to a U.S.-sponsored coup
d’état.

At
a November 25 forum in Brooklyn featuring a speaker from Batay Ouvriye,
supporters of the Internationalist Group/League for the Fourth
International
raised these criticisms of B.O.. The latter responded that after
December 2003,
Batay Ouvriye distanced itself from protests run by the bourgeois
opposition.
But, at least from its internationally distributed statements, B.O. did
not
call during February 2004 for mobilization against the invasion and
coup by
ex-military and death squad leaders. Nor did it call in March 2004 for
explicit
resistance to the U.S. occupation, but simply for a continuation of the
workers’ struggles for democratic and labor rights. Yet the day after
the
Marines landed, strikers at the Ouanaminthe free trade zone led by the
May 1
Workers Struggle Labor Federation affiliated with B.O. were the victims
of
repression by both the Dominican Army and remnants of the Haitian army
(see
“Stop Persecution of Haitian Workers in the Dominican Republic!”).

Revolutionaries
cannot be neutral in the face of an imperialist occupation, no matter
how
politically reactionary the forces opposing the occupiers. Thus we call
today
to defend the Iraqi peoples and hail blows against the U.S.-led
colonial
occupation, even when they come from Islamic fundamentalist and Iraqi
nationalist organizations that communists politically oppose tooth and
nail
(and who have killed thousands of Communists). The fact that Aristide
was
installed by the U.S. in 1994 and sought Washington’s support against
right-wing rebels in 2004 cannot be an
excuse for evading the fight against actual U.S. intervention!

Similarly,
in Panama in 1989, it was necessary to resist the U.S. invasion, even
though
Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was a former U.S. puppet and CIA
“asset.”
In Ethiopia in the 1930s, it was necessary to defend the struggle led
by Emperor
Haile Selassie, a slave-owning autocrat who presided over a feudal
society,
against the invasion by Italian imperialism under the fascist
Mussolini. As
Leon Trotsky wrote, this was not “a conflict between two rival
dictators,” that
the political form is not decisive but “rather, it is a question of the
relationship of classes and the fight of an underdeveloped nation for
independence
against imperialism” (“The Italo-Ethiopian Conflict,” July 1935).

Today,
Batay Ouvriye says it calls on Haitian workers to “fight the
occupation, the
foreign troops’ presence in the country, on the basis of their own
interests” (B.O.,
“2005: A Year ending in Repression and Terror for the Popular Masses,”
2
January). Yet until recently it hardly protested repression against
Lavalas
strongholds in the Port-au-Prince slums, nor have we seen any specific
calls by
B.O. for mobilization against the U.N. occupiers. Now another, vital
issue has
arisen. Last year, Lavalas supporters accused Batay Ouvriye of
accepting funds
from the AFL-CIO’s American Center for International Solidarity (ACILS)
which
originally came from the U.S. government via the National Endowment for
Democracy.
Initially, what was reported was a $3,500 contribution to support
workers fired
at Ouanaminthe. But it was subsequently charged that Batay Ouvriye was
the intended
recipient of US$99,965 from the NED, which lists the grant in its
summary of
projects approved for FY (fiscal year) 2005 (Jeb Sprague, “Batay
Ouvriye’s Smoking
Gun,” Haïti Progrès/This Week in Haiti, 4-10
January).

In a January 9
response, Batay Ouvriye admits that it received
$20,000-plus from the ACILS, and would like to see the rest.
Furthermore, it says that “we are prepared to
accept
any amount, even if it were a million dollars (!) coming from wherever
it may
come.” B.O.’s defense is that all money is dirty; that it has no direct
relation
with the NED, State Department or USAID; that where the AFL-CIO
Solidarity
Center gets its money is “their problem, not ours”; that this is a
partial payback
of money looted by the imperialists, and that they haven’t changed
their
political positions in order to receive the funds. Leaving aside the
fact that
Batay Ouvriye’s supporters for several months argued (and believed)
that B.O. had only received $3,500, that
the Lavalas supporters accusing B.O. are
only upset that they aren’t receiving the largesse from
Washington (as
they once did, when Aristide was being financed by the U.S.
government), and
that Sprague fingers B.O. supporters
by revealing names, the bottom line is that accepting funding from U.S.
imperialism
is a betrayal of the interests of Haiti’s working masses.

There should be no
illusions about where this money comes
from and what it represents. The ACILS is the continuation of the
notorious
American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which was known
throughout Latin America as the “AFL-CIA” for fomenting anti-Communist
coups in
Guyana, Chile, El Salvador and elsewhere. They finance death and
destruction of
the workers movement. Like the AIFLD, the ACILS is a front for, and is
directly
controlled by U.S. intelligence agencies. In the period before the
counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, the “AFL-CIA”
used to
fund only right-wing and social-democratic anti-Communists. Today, via
the NED,
they bankroll a host of “non-governmental organizations” and a wide
range of
opponents of governments the U.S. opposes. No doubt the NED is
interested in
Batay Ouvriye for its opposition to Aristide and Lavalas, just as the
ACILS finances
right-wing “labor” outfits like FOS and CATH.

This money is poison.
It is CIA money. The fact that it
is sent via the AFL-CIO “Solidarity Center” makes no difference. This
is what
intelligence agencies call a “cut-out,” designed to disguise the origin
of the
funds. Some ofB.O.’s supporters
have recognized
this. If others believe they can manipulate U.S. imperialism, this is a
dangerous opportunist illusion. Without formally “changing
its political line,” B.O. has already been
compromised by accepting funds from the
U.S.
government, the very force behind the “United Nations” occupation that
is terrorizing
the poor people of Haiti. And ultimately, as the old saying goes, “he
who pays
the piper calls the tune.” The fact that B.O. was
conspicuously silent for many months about the depredations
by U.N. troops and police in the Port-au-Prince slums at the very least
made it
more attractive to the ACILS/NED. Bottom line: being on the payroll of
U.S.
imperialism is incompatible with fighting against imperialism. In El
Alto,
Bolivia, at the height of the uprising last June, the workers movement
voted to
run out out “NGOs” funded by USAID, another imperialist front.

For
Haitian/Dominican Trotskyist Groups, to Fight for
Permanent Revolution!

We must draw a sharp
line between right-wing opposition
to Aristide/Lavalas and revolutionary opposition to these bourgeois
populists.
In the first place, it is necessary to mobilize working-class struggle
against
the imperialist occupation in U.N. blue helmets. Our comrades of the
Liga
Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil have campaigned in the unions
calling for
the Bazilian workers movement to fight to throw the Brazilian
contingent out of
Haiti, where it oppresses the impoverished black population. At the
initiative
of the LQB, the Brazilian National Confederation of Educational Workers
(CNTE)
passed a motion at its January 2005 congress “authoriz[ing] the CNTE to
call on
the workers and their organizations to aid the Haitian working people
in
expelling the invading Brazilian troops. If there is any transport of
military
armament, we must issue a call on the Brazilian working class to
boycott arms
shipments” (see “Drive Brazilian Troops Out of Haiti!” The
Internationalist
No. 20, January-February 2005).

In Haiti, the
struggle of the working class cannot focus
simply on strict trade-union demands. Workers and peasants self-defense
groups must
be formed to resist attacks by the bosses, the Haitian police, U.N.
forces and
right-wing militias. Class-conscious workers must seek to provide
proletarian
leadership to the struggle against imperialist occupation, drawing the
impoverished
slum population and the peasantry behind them. Revolutionaries engaged
in labor
organizing should expose the role of U.S. agencies who infiltrate the
workers
movement and divert it from struggle against the Haitian bourgeoisie
and its
imperialist overlords. Facing plantation owners such as the
manufacturers of
Cointreau and other liqueurs, as well as local political bosses who
brutally
oppress the smallholding and landless peasants, communists call for
agrarian
revolution in the countryside in conjunction with workers revolution in
the
cities. Above all, the central fight must be to forge a revolutionary
workers
party to lead this struggle, starting from the immediate demands of the
hard-pressed Haitian masses and leading to the fight for power.

Today we must begin
by seeking to cohere a
Leninist-Trotskyist nucleus, not only in Haiti but also next door in
the
Dominican Republic. Given the desperate conditions on the island, a key
place
where this work can be undertaken is an the centers of emigration,
particularly
in the United States and New York City, where hundreds of thousands of
Haitians
and Dominicans live in close proximity. Here it is easier to overcome a
century
and a half of nationalist animosities, and wage a fight against a
common
imperialist enemy. While thousands of Haitians are deported from the
Dominican
Republic, hundreds of Dominicans are deported from the U.S. And here
Haitians
and Dominicans are both subjected to racist abuse, as in one documented
case
last year, where an NYC elementary school official called Haitian
children “animals”
and ordered them to eat on the floor without utensils. By acting as a
“tribune
of the people” and champion of all the oppressed, demanding full
citizenship
rights for all immigrants, opposing imperialist intervention down the
line, and
fighting for joint Haitian/Dominican workers revolution, even small
revolutionary
forces can lay the basis for future struggles uniting working people
throughout
the Americas. n

1 Haiti was occupied by
the United States in 1915, under Democratic president Woodrow Wilson,and remained under U.S. occupation until
1934. The U.S. invaded again in 1994, under Democratic president Bill
Clinton,
to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide who had been overthrown in
a 1991
coup d’état by CIA “assets” in the Haitian military under
Republican president
George Bush I. George Bush II invaded Haiti a third time in 2004, this
time to
remove Aristide from the presidency, and spirit him off to exile. See:
“Haiti:
U.S. Engineers Death Squad Coup,” in The Internationalist No.
18,
May-June 2004.